Dr. Mike Contreras

Dr. Contreras is the General Manager of Public Sector at Topcoder. Mike leads growth and client engagement for public sector while ensuring the successful delivery of crowdsourcing products and services. He crafts the public sector strategy and fosters new relationships with agencies that can benefit from crowdsourcing-enabled solutions. Having spent time in the Federal Government being a champion of crowdsourcing programs, Mike is now fortunate to oversee the continued delivery of excellent outcomes for Topcoder’s longstanding agency partners like NASA, Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Defense.

Prior to Topcoder, Mike was an early adopter of crowdsourcing while launching and running the DOE Catalyst Energy Innovation Prize, a $1MM program funding scalable energy software startups. Mike is a contributor to TechCrunch on crowdsourcing topics and his innovation work has been highlighted by the White House, covered by Forbes, and Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies That Are Transforming Government. A former NASA rocket scientist and Fulbright Scholar, he holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from UCLA and a Master of Mechanical Engineering degree and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from Rice University.